Diamond In The Rough
by SereneCalamity
Summary: He needed her mess, her cutting edge…The imperfect hurricane that was her. Dotty. OneShot.


_This was meant to be something quick but then it turned into three thousand words! I hope you guys like it. Sorry about any mistakes, I'm in a rush on the way to work and wanted to get it up!_

_Disclaimer: I do not own the characters._

At the age of nineteen, Dominic Toretto had taken on a lot more responsibility than others his age. His mother had died when he had only been nine, and he had helped his father raise his younger sister and work in the Toretto garage. A few months after he had turned eighteen, his father had died in a car accident. The only thing that kept him centred through that time was Mia Toretto, who was sixteen, and his close friends who were more like family. He dropped out of school and took on working full time at the garage, putting to use all the skills that his father had taught him over the years. It had always been the plan that he take over the garage, keep the family business alive, but that wasn't supposed to happen for a long time. It had come too quickly. And then, about nine months later, he found a girl from their neighbourhood curled up in the back of the garage, shaking under a thin blanket.

He remembered her from school, she had been tough, taken on a couple guys older than her who had been hitting on her at a party. She had ended up being dragged out of the house, but she had gotten in a couple good punches, breaking one of the guys noses. Dom didn't know much about her, only what he had heard around the school, and that wasn't too much, given she didn't seem to be close with anyone and she hardly ever came. He gathered she hadn't had a good home life, her dad split when she was younger and her mum was an addict. When he had pulled the blanket off her, he had seen the scars on her arms, the obvious pin pricks from regular use of a needle.

Dom wasn't sure what had possessed him. He barely knew this girl. He blamed it on the fact he had been responsible for others for so. But he had picked her up, cradled her in his arms and closed the shop for the day, taking her back to their home. Leon Eppes had given him a strange look, especially when he saw who it was, but had gotten the shower running and woken up Mia, putting her in charge of clothing. That was when the girl had started waking up. Her eyes had flown up in panic and she had started lashing out, getting a good right hook on Dom and almost getting Mia straight in the eye before she had realized that Mia looked as scared as she did. She had scrambled to the corner of the room, her eyes darting everywhere. It was clear that she had been on a bad trip, and that she was scared. Dom had ordered everyone out, deciding she would be calmer with only one other person in the room. It had taken a while, but she finally calmed down, showered, eaten more than the four boys in the house combined, and then fell asleep for nearly twenty four hours.

It had taken months to get her to trust them completely. Mia loved having a girl around the house, a girl who wasn't there just because she was sleeping with one of the boys. And Leticia Ortiz seemed to love Mia. When Mia was at school, she would stay curled up in her room or on the couch, sullenly not speaking to anyone. But when they were together, they both seemed come to life. It was the happiest that Dom had seen his sister since his father died, and he wasn't sure if he kept Letty around because he actually wanted to help her, or if it was for selfish reasons, because she made his sister happy.

Either way, Letty had become part of the family.

Even after a year of her living with them, they still didn't have her full story. She shared bits and pieces, usually with Mia, sometimes with Dom, and they would try and make a picture out of the puzzle of her life. Dom had gone to her mothers house to collect some of her things and found the woman having sex with a known drug dealer on the couch, completely out of her mind. It was almost two months after he had taken Letty in and clearly this woman didn't give a damn. He had screwed his nose up in disgust, going up to her room and finding some clothes. He had taken what he could carry and then disappeared from the house again, not looking back. He eventually gathered from Letty that there had been three mortgages on the house, and given her mother barely went to her job, they hadn't any money for her to keep up her payments for her mothers constant cravings. So, her mother had offered up Letty. She had been fifteen the first time, no match for a man twice her size and body mass. As much as she despised the drugs that had stolen her mother away from her, she turned to them for escape. The next time her mother couldn't pay, Letty had been too drugged out of her mind to even protest. The night she had ended up in the Toretto garage she had managed to run away, even though there were drugs pumping through her system, which spoke bounds for her determination and strength.

She went through some bad stages of withdrawal, clawing at her skin and throwing up the contents in her stomach until there was nothing left. But they pushed through it. All of them, together. They found out that she was handy around the garage—more so than handy, actually. She held her own as well as any of the boys, claiming that she spent some summers with one of her cousins on the other side of the city and they had shown her around an engine. She was also the best female driver they had ever seen. Jesse Lomas seemed to have fallen in love with her, looking up to her with the adoration of a little brother. And she treated him that way, teasing him endlessly when he was turned down by a girl, but then snapping at anyone else who did. Her loyalty spread through to all of them, and within a year, it was as though she had always been a part of their team, their family.

"Okay, seriously, _please _tell me you didn't fuck that girl, man," Letty groaned, dropping her head dramatically into her hands. Vince Eppes made a pathetic expression as he stared across the room at her.

"Aw, Let," he sighed. "That ass…Those tits…I just couldn't resist! I was powerless!"

"She's a psychotic cow!" Letty exclaimed and Leon let out a shout of laughter.

"So are you, and we keep you around," he teased, punching her on the shoulder gently. She rolled her eyes at him as she finished off her bottle of Mountain Dew and threw it in the nearby bin.

"Exactly. And there's only room for one of us around here," she replied before sliding off the bonnet of her car and making her way back into the garage. The boys continued to talk about the redhead Vince had nailed in the weekend who had then smashed the windscreen of his car when he found out he had slept with her bestfriend only two nights previous. Dom raised his eyebrows as a greeting when she came back into the garage and she nodded shortly at him, getting back to work on the car she had been fixing before their lunch break.

Apart from Letty and Mia, he was the closest one to the Latina. They were drawn together by similar hardships in their lives—not that they had gone through the same things as one another, just that they had both been forced to grow up quickly. Sometimes they would stay away hours after everyone had already gone to bed, laying on their backs on the picnic table outside, staring up at the cloudless sky and drinking beer. Half the time the conversations were about absolutely nothing, a movie they had gone to recently or a race that was coming up. But the other half of the time, they bared their souls to one another. While Letty still got cagey about some of the things she went to and didn't want to go into details, she hinted at how she felt. Dom told her about loosing his mother, and his father, and how he didn't think he could survive if he lost his baby sister. He didn't, however, tell her that she was quickly becoming such a large part of his life that he could add her to the list of people he couldn't stand to loose. He didn't know how she would handle hearing it. While she had healed so much over the twelve months, there was still a look that she would get in her eyes sometimes, a wild look of someone who had seen too much.

So much of Letty was broken, and though Dom wanted to fix her, he knew that he had to give her time.

One thing that he loved and hated about Letty was how completely unpredictable she could be. Unlikely other females, including his sister, Dom couldn't read her mind, he never could figure out what she was thinking. The girls at the racers pretty much only wanted one thing. They wanted the status that came from sleeping with him. They didn't seem to realize that it wasn't a status to be longed after, he never went back for seconds and they instantly just fell into a racer skanks category for anyone who knew him. Sure, most of them _hoped _he would come back, that they would be the one to 'tame' the King of the Streets, but they were all the same, and he really wasn't interested in them that way. As for his sister, as much as she protested against it, he could read her like the back of his hand. She had started seeing a blonde racer who worked at a parts shop downtown, and she thought she was being so sneaky about it. Dom knew the second day she had started the relationship and had had Jesse do a full background check. Everything he read and heard about the boy he liked, so he didn't say anything to his sister until about three weeks later when she was late getting home. But no, with Letty, he never knew. Sometimes there would be a moment, her eyes would soften and she would run her tongue over her lower lip or suck it into her mouth, her pearly whites biting down almost nervously. It would spark something inside of him no-one had touched before and it made him want to say things he had laughed at his friends for saying. But then someone would come in, or the TV would suddenly jump up in volume and the spell would be broken.

Letty was feisty, independent, strong-minded…When she was in a bad mood the whole house would know about it. She would stalk through the hallways, slam doors, throw books, keys, sometimes plates. A guy tried to grab her ass one night after the races when they were having drinks. She had shot him a warning look, giving him a chance to back off. But then he had tried again, and she had snatched his hand off her backside, snapping his fingers back, breaking two of them. Another time, she walked in on Dom having sex with a girl in the bathroom when she had gone to take a piss. She had dragged the girl out by her hair and thrown clothes at Dom so hard his belt had whipped at his stomach and left an angry red mark.

But they put up with it. Because the bad moods were only ten percent of the time. The other ninety percent she was the life of the party, dragging Mia onto tables when they were drinking, forcing her to let loose. The boys loved her, treated her roughly like one of the boys until she got that broken expression. Then they would switch straight away, give her kisses on the cheek or tug on her hair. And Dom…Dom didn't love her. He was _in _love with her.

"Hey," Dom's voice was soft as he pushed open the door to Letty's room. "Letty?" He closed the door behind him as he took in her figure, laying out on her bed and facing away from him, toward the window. "Letty? Why didn't you come into work today?" They had realized at about ten o'clock that she mustn't be coming in, but had decided against contacting her, figured that they would just talk to her when they got home. Dom ran a hand over his shaved head, knowing that this could go either way. If she didn't want to talk and he pressed her, he would either get results and she would let him in, or he would leave the room with a bloody nose and a split lip. He decided to risk it, coming further into her room and sitting down on the edge of her bed. "Let…Talk to me…"

"It was mums birthday today," she muttered, and he heard a distinctive sniff. He reached over and touched her hip, pulling gently, hoping that she would roll over onto her back. She did, and she stared up at him through wet eyelashes. His first instinct was to wrap his arms around her and make it better, but he knew that wasn't what Letty would want. She was too independent for that. She dropped his gaze after a moment, swiping her hand angrily over her face. "Rang her to say have a good day and all that shit, and she just went nuts, saying that I left her alone, that I was nothing but a druggie whore, blah blah blah." Letty rolled her eyes as though it was nothing, but Dom knew it was bothering her. "God, I just…She still gets under my skin. After all this time." Dom didn't know what to say, so he settled for nothing, reaching down and brushing a strand of hair away from her cheek and tucking it behind her ear. Letty stared up at him with reddened eyes, chewing on her lower lip. "I…I don't think I ever said thank you, Dom."

"Eh," he shrugged.

"No," Letty shook her head slightly. "Thank you, Dom. For everything…" her voice was barely audible and Dom realized that they had been edging toward each other. They were only a whisper apart, and when her arm wound itself around his neck, their lips crashed together. She pulled him down to her, her legs circling his waist and cradling his erection between her legs. They grinded their hips down on one anothers as they nipped at each others lips, finger nails scratching over whatever skin they could reach. Letty sighed his name as he pushed open her shirt and grasped a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, rolling the stiff pebble until she was arching off the bed. She pulled at his own shirt, frantically throwing it to the ground and then they worked at their pants individually, moaning with relief as their skin finally touched. And when Dom slid inside Letty, it was the most amazing thing he had experienced. She rose to meet each of his strokes, her eyes never leaving his as her fingers dug into his shoulders.

Afterwards, she fell asleep in his arms. He dosed in and out of sleep before he heard his sister come home from school. Then he dressed, and went downstairs to help her with dinner. When Letty had come through the door to the kitchen, Dom realized he had made a mistake by leaving her there. She avoided his eyes, barely spoke when he asked her something. He tried to talk to her but she left the room. The next few weeks past uneventfully, no-one seeming to notice the tension between the two. Dom wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. He wasn't sure if she regretted what had happened between the two, or if she was hurt he had left her. But he knew that he had pushed her enough for now, so the next step was up to her.

And she took it at a surprising moment.

It was almost three weeks later. Dom had tried talking to her a couple of times, saying that he was sorry he left her and that he wanted to talk. She replied once to him, saying that she wasn't some prissy bitch who needed to be looked after, that she didn't expect rose petals and champagne every time she had sex. There was a party on a Saturday night after the races back at their place, as their usually was. Since sleeping with Letty, Dom had avoided all other racer chasers. He was drunk tonight, very drunk, and when a platinum blonde with a short skirt and a bustier brushed up against him, he responded in kind, not kissing her, but allowing her to latch onto his neck, her tongue flicking over the skin. Letty had been watching from the other side of the room where she was standing with Leon and Vince. They saw her looking over at Dom but didn't say anything, interested to see how things played out. They knew that Dom had a thing for her, but she had been pretty close mouthed as to how she felt. Her nostrils flared in a sure sign of jealousy as the blonde pulled on Dom's hand, pulling him into the privacy of the kitchen. With that, Letty shoved her bottle of beer into Leon's hand and stalked across the room. Dom was leaning against the fridge, eyes trained on the blonde's chest which was on full display, as the blonde played with his zipper.

"Don't you want me, Dom?" She pouted as she rubbed him through the front of his pants. Letty's eyes dropped and she realized that he wasn't even hard. She had had him inside her several weeks ago and he had stretched her to the point where it had hurt for a couple days after. She would be able to tell if he was hard now.

"You need to fuck off," Letty's voice was deadly quiet. The blonde spun around to glare at the Latina. Dom's eyes flashed over to her and he raised an eyebrow questioningly.

"Oh, yeah? And who are you?" The blonde sneered. Letty closed the distance between them, a deadly glint in her eye that should probably have scared Dom, but it turned him on. Her cheeks were flushed with anger as she pressed her face right up in front of the blondes. The girl at least had the decency to take a step back. "So? Who the fuck are you?" Her question might have sounded more careless if there hadn't been a whimper at the end.

"It doesn't matter who I am," Letty growled. "All that matters is that you're a fucking whore, who's touching my man." Dom's eyes widened in surprise at the comment. The blonde looked as though she was going to protest but she wisely shut her mouth as Letty brought her fist slamming down on the bench beside her. She ran from the kitchen as quick as she could in the five inch heels she was wearing. Letty brought her glaring eyes up to Dom, who was giving her a sheepish look. "I don't fuck just anyone," she hissed at him.

"I know," he murmured. She nodded slowly. He reached out for her, a hand wrapping around her own that had slammed down on the bench. He felt her slowly relaxing under his touch, and he curled his fingers around hers, tugging her closer. "You're a bloody mess, you know that." Letty shrugged. "And I don't know if I'm ever going to understand you."

"No-one asked you too," she mumbled.

"I want you to let me try, though," he said softly, resting his forehead against hers. She gave him the smallest yet sweetest smile he had ever seen on her face, and it made her eyes glow in a way he hadn't seen before.

"That's what you keep doing, isn't it," she murmured. "You keep rescuing me, and trying to fix me." Dom shook his head subtly.

"There's nothing to fix, Let," he said just before he captured her lips with his.

_Let me know what you lovelies think!_


End file.
